Yogi Adityanath takes a dig at Congress temple run | Hindustan Times

Chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Monday pulled out a statement made by the Congress during the Gujarat election campaign describing party chief Rahul Gandhi as a ‘janeu-dhari Brahmin’ (one who wears the sacred thread) to state that a series of electoral defeats at the hands of the BJP had forced an ideological shift in Congress.

Adityanath said the temple run of a Congress leader whose forefather had described himself as an “accidental Hindu” was no accident.

He was speaking at a convention of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on Lucknow’s Para road.

“Those who earlier avoided temples for fear of being dubbed communal now require temple (visits) more than us. This shift has been forced upon them (Congress) through efforts of nationalist cadres like you. The series of electoral debacles are thus a lesson (for the Congress) to not ignore the country’s majoritarian viewpoint, else the country’s democracy will dump them in a place from where it will be difficult to return,” Adityanath said.

The Congress, whose improved showing in the Gujarat elections was also attributed to Rahul’s strategy to visit series of temples, predictably denied ‘accidental Hindu’ charge that Adityanath obviously made about the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi’s great grandfather.

“Nehru never called himself a Hindu by accident. It’s a BJP canard,” said Congress secretary Devendra Nath Singh. However, Professor Kaushal Kishore, the head of the political science department of BHU, cited Nehru’s Discovery of India to confirm Yogi’s attribution.

Former Congress lawmaker Akhilesh Pratap Singh accused the BJP of misleading people in the name of religion.

Adityanath also called upon 33 lakh ABVP cadres to market schemes of the governments in the state and the Centre saying that Dalits were still unaware of the many schemes that the Modi government had initiated for them.

He said recruitment process of 68,000 teachers in the state has been initiated. This is part of the 1.37 lakh teacher recruitments planned by his government, he said.

“We are also going to recruit 1.62 lakh PAC jawans and police followers. We also plan to reform the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission (UPPSC) and open recruitments to 60,000 posts in a transparent manner. Now, none would be able to say that 56 of the 86 appointments have been made from a particular caste or region,” he said.

The reference was to the appointments made during the Samajwadi Party rule when some UPPSC aspirants had moved court, claiming that 86 sub divisional magistrates chosen by the UPPSC over the last three years were Yadavs – the OBC caste group considered loyal to SP.